Actual Reality

The Acer Aspire 6930 laptop belongs to Acer’s “home entertainment” line, a group of laptops that sport glossy widescreen displays, dual-core processors, and additional multimedia features designed with entertainment in mind. The 6930 series laptops are based on the Intel GM45 chipset and feature the following base specifications (you can also view them at the manufacturer’s website):

• Intel Core 2 Duo processors with Intel Centrino 2 technology
• 3 or 4  GB of DDR2 RAM @ 667 MHz
• 250 or 320 GB SATA hard drives
• DVD-RW DL optical drives (optional Bluray disc drive)
• 16.0″ glossy WXGA LCD with 16:9 aspect ratio
• Intel GMA 4500 graphics (NVIDIA graphics available on some models)
• Intel Wireless 802.11a/b/g/n, gigabit ethernet, 56k modem (optional Bluetooth 2.0+EDR)
• Integrated webcam, stereo microphones, subwoofer, and surround output

The model I review here is the AS6930-6082, which includes a T5800 processor (two 2.0 GHz cores, 2 MB L2 cache per core), 4 GB RAM, a 250 GB hard drive, and comes loaded with Windows Vista Home Premium (64-bit edition). However, as I point out below, this laptop is very well-suited to running Linux, which I installed not too long after purchase.

First Impressions

Weighing in at 7.5 lbs and measuring 1.7″ thick, the Aspire 6930 certainly doesn’t come across as a lightweight. My first impression was of just how heavy and large this laptop is. Compared with my 12″ Powerbook, it was like carrying several large textbooks around.

In the box with the laptop were a 6-cell battery, AC adapter, and manuals. No recovery CDs were included, but software to make the discs was included.

Hardware Features and Build Quality

Unlike many of its competitors, Acer has opted for slightly less gloss on the cases of their laptops. The palmrest has a semi-rough texture that I found much nicer than the smooth plastic on other laptops. The touchpad is slightly lower than the palmrest area, but has the same texture. The scroll area is separated from the main touchpad by a ridge of plastic. In practice, I liked this setup; it seemed more intuitive than having the scroll bar integrated with the main trackpad area. Above the palmrest and around the keyboard is a small strip of glossy black plastic. Above the keyboard is an area of plastic mesh covering the speakers. Above that is a cylinder which the display hinges on, and which also houses the TUBA subwoofer.

Around the display is more glossy plastic. Above the display are the microphones and webcam. The back of the display (or lid) is made of a very dark-blue glossy plastic that also showcases a lighted Acer logo. In most lighting situations, the lid appears to be black; however, if you apply a bright light you’ll see that it is really a sparkly blue. Unfortunately, this surface tends to collect scratches and fingerprints very easily. If you’re really worried about the appearance of the laptop, you can use a soft cloth to buff out any of the smudges that appear on the lid.

One of the great features of the laptop is the array of ports included:

One port that is missing is an S-Video port; this has been ousted in favor of the HDMI output. Also, on my model the E-SATA port is not present (it is covered by a plastic blank).

The keyboard is full sized, and includes a numerical keypad. The keys are glossy, and like all glossy surfaces show dirt and smudges all the more. Also, the keyboard has a significant amount of flex to it and a rather shallow stroke depth. I found that while I was able to type on the keyboard without any problems, I wouldn’t want to type for hours on it. If you spend most of your time typing, you may want to attach an external keyboard (or buy a different laptop).

The 16″ “CineCrystal” glossy display has a native resolution of 1366×768 (WXGA) and a 16:9 aspect ratio, which makes it great for viewing DVDs full-screen. For HD buffs, the resolution may be a disappointment since 1080p content will be scaled down. However, I feel that the resolution is more than enough for most people. Colors are vibrant, and text is crisp and very readable. The horizontal viewing range is excellent, allowing nearly 180 degrees of visibility without much color shift. The vertical viewing range, on the other hand, is only average, allowing about 45 degrees of movement up or down before the colors begin to invert. Also, the range of the hinges is a bit lacking—meaning you won’t be able to tilt the screen back very far.

Other than the keyboard, the build quality seems good. The display is stiff, and doesn’t flex easily. The main body of the laptop, although plastic, is firm and feels very sturdy. As far as the hardware components, they are mostly industry-standard and high quality. Since most modern laptops are made with the same components, I think that this laptop will be as reliable as most other laptops on the market today.

Entertainment Features

As I noted before, the Aspire 6930 is designed mostly for home entertainment. Several features included with it are oriented towards this purpose: the display, media control buttons, audio system, graphics system, I/O ports, as well as the bundled software. The options to add a Bluray drive and a TV tuner also make this an appealing laptop for home theater enthusiasts.

Display

The display has a 16:9 aspect ratio, allowing full-screen DVD playback without any letterboxing (black bars above and below the image). The high-end models feature a 1920×1080 resolution, giving a full HD 1080p video playback.

Media Control Buttons

The media control buttons give access to volume control, skip, pause/play, and stop. The buttons are capacitive, and glow blue when the laptop is on. To the right of the media control buttons are four buttons that perform programmable actions. By default, they function as wireless on/off, launch Internet, launch Bluetooth manager, and launch Acer Arcade. Also, in the top right corner is a button which turns virtual surround sound on or off.

Audio System

The audio system features two stereo speakers as well as a “Tuba CineBass” woofer. In reality, this is little more than a low to mid-range speaker that adds a small amount of bass. However, I would say that the speakers on this laptop aren’t bad and have more bass and overall volume than any other laptop speakers I’ve heard so far.

For I/O there are three 1/8″ minijack ports available. The black port doubles as stereo output or optical SPDIF output, while the other two are the line and microphone inputs.

Dolby Home Theater certification supposedly “deliver[s] the best possible listening experience.” Functionally, it allows the user to choose from a few simulated surround sound settings and a bass booster. In other words, it doesn’t do much, other than giving you a fancy logo above the speakers.

Technically speaking, the audio system is powered by an  Intel ICH9/HD audio controller, which boasts 192kHz/32-bit quality and native multi-channel output.

Webcam

Built into the casing above the LCD is a small “Crystal Eye” webcam and microphone. The webcam is capable of 640×480 resolution at best. During my testing, I found the image from the webcam to be average. Colors were off, especially under fluorescent lighting, and the image was a bit pixelated or fuzzy. It is certainly good enough to use as a webcam, but isn’t good for much else. The same could also be said about the microphone—it’s decent enough to use for voice chat, but I wouldn’t use it for anything else.

Graphics System

The graphics system for the low-end 6930s is the integrated Intel Graphics Media Accelerator (GMA) 4500MHD. The GMA 4500MHD provides native support for DirectX 10, Bluray, Windows Aero, and hardware decoding of HD video streams. For the end-user, this means that it is possible to run Windows Vista with all of the fancy graphics enabled. It also means that HD is fully supported, especially in combination with the built-in HDMI port. However, it doesn’t mean that the latest games will run. The GMA 4500MHD is very underpowered when it comes to video game graphics. I would be surprised if even Half-Life 2 ran smoothly enough to play on it. In my limited testing, a few older games ran without a hitch. For example, I was able to play Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2 with the graphics maxed out without any trouble.

On the higher-end 6930s, dedicated graphics are available. Any serious gamer would definitely want to spring for the more expensive options, which offer NVIDIA GeForce 9300M or 9600M graphics with 256 or 512 MB of dedicated RAM. With the 9600M it should be possible to play most new games at reasonable settings; however, this laptop really isn’t designed specifically for gaming so another laptop might be a better choice.

One feature of the graphics system that is particularly geared towards home theater use is the HDMI port. This makes it possible to connect the laptop directly to any TV that has an HDMI input, providing digital video and audio transfer. This is ideal if you want to watch DVDs or Bluray discs on your TV using your laptop.

Bundled Software

All of the 6930s come bundled with either Windows Vista Ultimate or Home Premium, which includes Media Center. Also bundled is Acer Arcade, which is based on Cyberlink’s PowerCinema. Whichever software you use, you can use the laptop as a media center to watch movies, listen to music, and record TV (with the optional TV tuner). It’s pretty clear that Acer is aiming to attract the home theater crowd with this laptop.

Battery Life

Under a normal load (browsing the web, listening to music, word processing, etc.) the battery lasts about 2 hours on average. With a minimal load (editing some text) and the display set at minimum brightness, it’s possible to get about 2 hours and 15 minutes of life. And with a full load (ripping CDs, playing video games, etc.) I wouldn’t expect the battery to last much longer than 1 hour and 30 minutes.

Performance

So how does the laptop perform? While I didn’t carry out any comprehensive benchmarks, I have to say that performance is very snappy. Even running Windows Vista Home Premium with all of the included bloatware, response times were fast and application launch times short. With a system like this, even Vista performs decently enough.

However, I knew that running Vista would be a terrible waste of this laptop’s power. Sure, for most people Vista will be adequate. But I like to know that I’m putting my hardware to good use, so that I have power to spare. Frankly, Vista tends to grab as many resources as it can. For example, after a regular bootup it would already be consuming about 1 GB or more of RAM. And the default installation occupied about 10 GB of the hard drive. Also, I noticed that the hard drive was constantly being accessed, even after I disabled indexing, SuperFetch, and half of the other unneccessary services that were running. It was time to install Linux to see what this laptop was really capable of.

Installing Linux (Ubuntu 8.10)

I chose to install Ubuntu 8.10 (64-bit) on my laptop, mostly because I’ve used Ubuntu in the past with good results. Installation from the Live CD proceeded as smoothly as could be possible. Almost all of the hardware was supported out of the box, including the graphics, audio, wireless networking, and webcam (with some minor issues described below). Standby and hibernate functioned correctly, and special keys such as volume, display brightness, and the media control buttons worked properly. In short, I didn’t have to do any manual configuration to get things working! This was a first for me. Every other time that I installed Ubuntu on a computer, I always seemed to run into something which required some adjustment to work. This time I didn’t have to do anything. I was even able to connect to a WPA2-protected network without so much as editing a configuration file. Desktop effects also worked out of the box, although I prefer to disable them to maximize performance.

Thanks to Adobe, a 64-bit version of Flash now exists for Linux; I found that full-screen Flash videos from Hulu.com and elsewhere played very smoothly. Although I’m not much of a gamer, I tried out a few racing games including TORCS and found that they ran fine.

I also tested Virtual Box to see how well virtualization would perform on this system. After installing Windows XP, I was pleasantly surprised to see that it ran almost as fast as it would natively. In the past I have found virtualization to be painfully slow for most purposes. Now that I’ve seen how fast it can work, I plan to use it for software testing.

What Didn’t Work

The built-in microphone didn’t work, although I tried several configurations. I’ve heard reports of others with the same problem, especially in Ubuntu, so I’m crossing my fingers in hopes that this will get fixed. Also, the webcam defaulted to the lower resolution of 320×240, and there was no obvious way to switch it back to the higher resolution. There may be a way to do this, so I plan on doing some research and posting my results here.

Conclusion

The Acer Aspire 6930 is a great laptop in most respects. I’ve been very happy with the quality, features, and performance that it has. I’d especially recommend it to people looking for a good Linux laptop that doesn’t require any complicated setup.

It would also be great as a media center, as a desktop replacement, or as a general purpose laptop. I wouldn’t recommend using it as a school laptop, because of its weight and size.

• Quality: 4.5/5
• Features: 5/5
• Battery life: 3.5/5
• Performance 5/5
• Portability: 2.5/5

Overall rating: 4/5

Update (11 February 2009):

I’ve written up a guide to installing Windows XP on the Acer Aspire 6930 for those that are interested.